Facebook Has a Press Con; Announces "Deals"

Facebook had a press conference at their headquarters last night (India time). Along with denying a Facebook mobile and talking about the popularity of Facebook mobile, Mark Zuckerberg announced 'Deals', a feature to go along with their location based service, Places. Deals is Facebook's attempt to push people to their mobiles more.

Zuckerberg talks Deals

Here's the interesting thing about Places. It had barely been announced and it already had partners like McDonalds lining up with offers for customers. While Foursquare has actively worked towards making deals for mayors to receive discounts, Facebook, being the juggernaut it is, got off easy. One of their partners is the Gap, who are offering a free pair of jeans to the first 10,000 users of Deals who check into their local Gap store. There's interesting point number two. While Foursquare mainly gets you discounts based on loyalty, Deals will do loyalty rewards along with one time offers, and bring a friend offers with no extra importance attached to any of them in particular.

Now, Deals, like Foursquare, will have no benefit to us citizens of Desistan yet. Here's to hoping they find some organization in our corporate chaos to function here. All hope isn't lost though, as a few places in India are realizing the value of location based social networking. For example, a few months ago, popular concert venue, The Blue Frog, gave out free passes to the mayor of the venue on Foursquare. The scope is here, the effort needs to come along with it.